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Do you count heard only birds on your life list? (4 Viewers)

Do you count heard only birds on your life list?

  • Yes, I will tick any bird that I hear if I can be confident of the identification

  • Yes, but only for certain birds that are difficult to see

  • No, but I count them for other types of lists, e.g. my year list

  • No--I never tick a bird for any of my personal lists unless I see it

Results are only viewable after voting.
I went with 2. It was a bit tricky as I've never counted a bird for my life list on heard-only, so I had to imagine a scenario. Would I count a singing nocturnal Baillon's Crake in the UK? (not seen or heard in the UK, although seen in the WP). Truthful answer is I probably would - if the bird was there, and I was there, then it would be silly not to. The experience would count. 5 or 10 years ago though I wouldn't have. (It should also be said I don't know my life list numbers wise).

Year ticks etc on heard-only are absolutely fine, although again, 10 years ago I wouldn't have.

I've never been to the tropics or anywhere with a large number of new species to be dealt with. I'd have to ask myself whether I'd upgrade to 1) in that situation. Not sure.
 
Only one bird heard only on my life list: Seychelles Scops Owl.....and only on there cos that's what it was, there was noone else around to be taping and I won't be going back to Seychelles anytime soon! (And its my list lol)
 
Andy Adcock said:
I failed to see, after hearing, Whiskered Wren, Southern Nightingale-Wren and Flutest Wren in Venezuela, whilst they are noted in my trip report, none appear on my life list. We did manage to see Coraya Wren.
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Fair enough. For myself, I answered 1. As a birder, I have experienced the bird sufficiently, whether seen or heard, for it to count towards my life total. It's been interesting to read different views of "sufficiency."
 
Andy Adcock said:
Same story with the above, I also have a similar tale of woe with Blue-naped Pitta which remained unseen, despite being just feet away in Vietnam.
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Bogota Rail for me. Couldn’t have been more than five or six feet away, but I just couldn’t see it in the reeds. To make the situation even more frustrating, it called almost constantly for about ten minutes.

Dave
 
Of my 5,006 lifers, I was only able to get audio recordings for 966 of them so far. So I guess only about 20% of my birds have been 'properly ticked' by the standards that I'd apply if I was being a stickler.

I estimate that about 1% of my lifers fall into the heard-only bin overall, so about 50 birds. Not very much. I am way more concerned with the ones I have not recorded.
 
Definitely option 4. I don't know where the skill is in simply hearing something? Plus with the abundance of talented mimics around, how could you ever be sure that what you think you're hearing is what you're actually hearing - unless you see it.
 
I do tick 'heard only', in the column I made specially for that in my bird-list excel sheet. I do moving the bird to the 'seen' column an upgrade, but not the the extend that I would skip observing a whole new bird, just to see one that I haven't heard before.
 
mjh73 said:
35% count HO for life list
An additional 35% count for 'other' non life lists.

So only 30% won't consider HO in any circumstances.
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You're misrepresenting the question, you should have been a politician, the question is

Do you count heard only birds on your life list?​

There are two columns which say yes and two which say no, the no's, combined have c65%

I've never argued that in certain circumstances, HO shouldn't be 'recorded' and certainly in things like surveys, of course they would count.

I did a 'Bird race' once in Malaysia and even then, if a species was being claimed by a team, at least two of them had to 'see' the bird. This business of counting HO's, someone already stated that they think it may be an American thing, I suspect that this may be true.

I heard Bay Owl about five times over ten years before I saw one and ticked it.
 
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Strontium Dog said:
Definitely option 4. I don't know where the skill is in simply hearing something? Plus with the abundance of talented mimics around, how could you ever be sure that what you think you're hearing is what you're actually hearing - unless you see it.
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In a way, knowing what you can tick on what in a given area is part of the game (and part of the reason why I periodically review my sightings when I learn about new similarities/mimicry, although it rarely leads to losing a whole heard-only lifer, as there are usually other sightings left).
 
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I think it's kind of a grey area, because I do count heard only birds on my life list but as heard only. So I have 2 numbers for my life list. This wasn't given specifically as an option. I consider this a different option because it differs from all my other bird lists (patch, garden, year, trip etc) which don't differentiate at all between seen and heard only.
 

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